Algorithms obscure power asymmetries more opaquely than print ever did.
Evidence
In Imagined Communities, the iniquitous aspect of spectrality, beyond forming collective identity and “shared fatality,” lay in obscuring the “actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail” within the nation (Anderson 1991, 7). Speculative communities draw their own veil over power asymmetries in the vast networks of computational code, sensors, and backend analytics. … At the same time, today’s communications media afford a sense of simultaneity at the level of the screen, which engenders a more opaque, and hence less well understood, copresence. The underlying mechanism is here hidden code rather than the newspaper’s visible ordering of text (via the display of calendrical day). The complex algorithms driving, mining, and controlling the traffic of commodified personal data are often not fully legible even by data miners themselves. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 93
Categorization
- XREF: Parallels themes from Against Postmodernism readings on ideology critique and the opacity of technical systems. — connects to: Algorithms’ behavior is opaque even to their own programmers. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 313; Power flows when coded, like money, transmitting reduced complexity; Dark pools and algorithmic trading remain opaque even to most traders — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 92 (+2 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Algorithms’ behavior is opaque even to their own programmers. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 313; Power flows when coded, like money, transmitting reduced complexity; Dark pools and algorithmic trading remain opaque even to most traders — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 92 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Early printers faced lethal financial risk in guessing print run sizes
#complicates(0.72) — Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen, The Library- A Fragile History, 171